First-class stalemate

The U.S. Postal Service has backed off from a controversial but necessary end to Saturday deliveries.

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recordnet.com

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Posted Apr. 14, 2013 at 12:01 AM

Posted Apr. 14, 2013 at 12:01 AM

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The U.S. Postal Service has backed off from a controversial but necessary end to Saturday deliveries.

The USPS in February said ending Saturday service, except for package deliveries, was a needed cost-cutting move to help trim multibillion dollar deficits that have plagued the service for years.

Last year, the USPS ran a $16 billion deficit despite years of cuts that trimmed its work force by 193,000 employees, about 28 percent, and consolidated about 200 mail processing centers, including the one in south Stockton.

Last year, the service handled a mail volume of about 160 billion items, well down from more than 200 billion items in 2005 and roughly the same volume it handled in 1988. Much of that reduction is in first-class mail and reflects customers switching to email and social media to communicate.

In that same period, however, the number of addresses the USPS services increased from 114 million in 1988 to 152 million last year.

All this comes in the face of rising costs, work force cuts and a congressional mandate passed in 2006 requiring the service to pay into future retiree health benefits, something no other agency does. That requirement alone accounted for $11.1 billion of the USPS's $16 billion deficit last year.

Clearly, more changes are a must. Slicing the relatively low-volume Saturday service seemed a reasonable move.

But there is opposition among special interest groups and some in Congress, despite polls showing most Americans support ending Saturday service.

Last year, the Senate passed legislation to block the Postal Service's move to end Saturday service, demanding a delay of two more years and even more cost cutting. The House refused to go along.

In February, in announcing it would drop Saturday service, the agency essentially asked Congress to drop from spending legislation its longtime ban on five-day-only delivery. Congress did not do that when it passed a spending measure last month.

So we have this stalemate: an independent agency that gets no tax dollars for its day-to-day operations blocked from making many needed changes by congressional whims. The huge and seemingly ever-increasing USPS deficits are much easier to understand in this context even if they are maddeningly hard to stomach.